ss than a benefaction to the human
race. And in such a work one of the easiest and most obvious points
would be this,--that the spirit of civilizations has a certain power of
changing the form of its body by successive partial rejections and
remouldings; and the degree in which they prove capable of this
continuous _palingenesia_ is one important measure of their depth and
determinant of their duration.

For writing such a work we do not think Dr. Draper perfectly qualified.
For this we find in him no tokens of an intelligence sufficiently
subtile, penetrating, and profound. He is, moreover, too heady and too
well cased in his materialistic strait-waistcoat. Nevertheless, his book
carries in it a certain large suggestion; it contains many excellent
observations; its tone is unexceptionable; the style is firm and clear,
though heavy and disfigured by such intolerable barbarisms as "commence
to" walk, talk, or the like,--the use of the infinitive instead of the
participle after _commence_. Dr. Draper is an able man, a scholar in
science, a well-informed, studious gentleman in other provinces; but he
tries to be a legislator in thought, and fails.

_De l'Origine du Langage_. Par ERNEST RENAN, Membre de l'Institut.
Quatrieme Edition, augmentee. Paris.

It seems to be the law of French thought, that it shall never be
exhaustive of any profound matter, and also that (Auguste Comte always
excepted) it shall never be exhausting to the reader. German thought may
be both; French is neither; English thought--but the English do not
think, they dogmatize. Magnificent dogmatism it may be, but dogmatism.
Exceptions of course, but these are equally exceptions to the
characteristic spirit of the nation.

M. Renan is thoroughly French. The power of coming after the great
synthetic products of the human spirit and distributing them by analysis
into special categories, eminent in his country, is pre-eminent in him.
The facility at slipping over hard points, and at coming to unity of
representation, partly by the solving force of an interior principle,
and partly by ingenious accommodations, characteristic of French
thought, characterizes his thinking in particular. That supremacy of the
critical spirit in the man which secures to it the loyalty of all the
faculties is alike peculiar to France among nations, and to this writer
among Frenchmen. In Germany the imagination dominates, or at least
contends with, the critical spirit; the Fr